Rawalpindi is hot and dirty. We don’t waste much time outside, preferring to hide ourselves away, along with several other travellers, in the restaurant of the Al-Azam Hotel. Blue, Kerry and I visit the Rajah Bazaar. Taking a Suzuki van, decked out in indescribable tinsel, to Fowra Chowk, we walk down a side street and into the network of alleys which make up the bazaar.
Here the exotic pantheon of Asian commerce is laid out in all its colourful abundance. Rows and rows of small shops sell soap and washing powder, sweets and biscuits, cooking oil and ghee. Old men with henna-orange beards crouch amid stacks of pan and neatly packaged portions of indigo and henna stapled onto pages cut from glossy magazines. In a busy street next to the spice lanes, merchants sit amongst piles of potatoes, onions, garlic and greens. The occasional goat marches about eating tidbits of food.
Standing on a street corner talking to a vendor of lemonade, the police suddenly swoop on another vendor nearby, packing him off into a van. The man we are talking to swiftly hides his wares from them: obviously an unlicensed trader as well.
We climb to a second-floor restaurant, dark and grimy, where we drink chai under the incredulous gaze of the other diners gathered there. Later, along the street outside, I buy half a kilo of garam masala for ₹20 from a merchant surrounded by colourful heaps of spice: yellow turmeric, red chilli, green coriander, and black tea.
In the evening we set off by taxi over to the Australian Embassy in Islamabad where we sip cold cans of VB in the Coolabah Club. Although it is nice to drink beer again, and the large assortment of travellers creates a nice atmosphere, I can’t help wondering about the constraints of life in a diplomatic enclave. Blue, Joff and I play a couple of games of pool against a pair of obnoxious expats, a man and his son. They cheat, or at least play by some dodgy house rules. But we accept defeat graciously and wish that we could have beaten the smarmy peer of prats who obviously spend their entire time practising.
The expats all seem to be full of their own importance, the result, I suppose, of being part of an elite group in various countries. But they all seem bored, gossipy and somehow scared of losing their identity, which is tenuous anyway. I talk to a fat, sweating Australian girl who tells me conspiratorially that she sneaks into the American bar, which is for over twenty-ones only. She is nineteen and has only spent four years in Australia. She has an identity to match: part American, part Australian, part nowhere.
We hitch a lift outside the embassy, which, in the fading light of evening when we arrived, had seemed like a corner of Canberra with fragrant gumtrees, bush-covered hills, warm air and corrugated iron roofs. All that was missing was the sound of kookaburras. The men who take us up the road to Rawalpindi belong to some fundamentalist Muslim group who want Pakistan to become an Islamic state similar to Iran. They hope to achieve this utopian condition by peaceful means and the young man who explains their philosophy is both erudite and loquacious. I don’t have the patience to tell him that to create an Islamic state is to set the clock back to the 7th century and to alienate most of the world.
We dine at the Excellency Table and somehow it is not the same as it was three years ago when Magnus, Linda and I had arrived, famished, from our marathon descent from Besham and the gorges of the Indus. Outside it is gently raining, the streets black and glossy, and the air cool.
CurseOfTheTraveller 